Another mall is just what San Fernando Valley doesn’t need: Letter

Re “New Woodland Hills mall may come with a price” (Letters, March 14):

I agree that paid parking at the Village at Westfield Topanga would be prohibitive. The larger point is what this project would truly cost. We cannot afford another shopping mall in the West Valley, for health and quality-of-life reasons.

The Los Angeles Unified School District sued the city of Los Angeles in 1996 in an effort to stop further development in the area due to projected increases in noise and air pollution. Canoga Park High School and Parkman Middle School were cited as schools which would suffer the effects of greater traffic congestion. Those projections have been borne out.

I lived in West Hills in the mid-1980s and feared what the Warner Center project would later yield. It is overdeveloped, creating a concrete commercialism where once stood a pastoral agriculture center. Canoga Park High School, which celebrates its centennial this year, retains one of the few reminders of the area’s early history in its campus farm.

Yes, 2014 is not 1914, but must we surrender our small remaining measure of sane simplicity for a further piece of commercial pie? Must schools near Westfield Topanga also bear a similar burden? Let’s stop this madness now.